Social media usage is coming like a tidal wave, and employers need to be thinking about their offense—how to present themselves online—and their defense—how to respond to negative expressions about their company on blogs and rant sites.
Alison Davis, a communications consultant, recommends a thorough and proactive approach. Davis is CEO of Davis & Company (davisandco.com). She made her comments at a recent webinar hosted by BLR®.
Davis finds that employers tend to divide into three groups:
- Those not using social media and would rather not
- Those who are planning and starting to use social media
- Those who are actually using social media
Davis says that most of her clients are in the middle group—feeling their way along. She strongly recommends that those in the first group, not even considering social media, start to get involved now.
What Is Social Media?
Davis points out that traditional media—newspapers, TV, radio—are one-way streets: They produce, package, and present content, but the audience doesn’t participate. Whereas in social media, it’s a two-way street and everyone gets to play. It’s fully participative.
“With social media, there is listening, learning, and sharing,” Davis says. “The spectrum is vast. And it’s growing so fast and expanding so fast, it is hard to keep up.
“You’ve got sites like Facebook for everyone, and then you’ve got specific, narrow networks, for example, for people who love to knit. You’ve got long blogs and then things like Twitter, the microblog where all messages are 140 characters or less.”
The underlying context is that individual users can share what they are doing, what they think, their videos, photos, conversations, and comments.
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Who Is Using It
Davis quotes a Pew Research Center survey that found the following percentages of usage over various age groups:
|
|
|
Age group |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Usage |
|
18–29 |
|
30–39 |
|
40–49 |
|
50–64 |
|
2007 |
|
67% |
|
21% |
|
11% |
|
6% |
|
2009 |
|
70% |
|
43% |
|
29% |
|
16% |
|
Increase |
|
4% |
|
105% |
|
164% |
|
166% |
What’s surprising is how fast the usage by older groups is growing, Davis notes.
Another survey, by global IT consulting firm Avanade, found that 60% of top 500 executives said that social media was not on their agenda. Their reasons were:
- Security: 75%
- Senior apathy: 57%
- Fear of unproven technologies: 58%
Another survey of 500 executives, done for Deloitte, found the following:
- 31% say their CEO is on Facebook
- 30% say social networking is part of their business and operations strategy
- 29% utilize social networking as a tool to manage and build their brand
- 23% utilize social networking as an internal communications tool
- 23% utilize social media to recruit employees
- 21% utilize social media to engage employees
- 18% have an employee-created Facebook group
- 13% post corporate videos on YouTube
Deloitte also did an interesting survey that focused on employees.
- 74% agreed that it’s easy to damage a company’s reputation on social media
- 53% said their Facebook pages are none of employers’ business
- 24% don’t even know if their company has a policy
- 49% say a policy would not change how they behave
The last statistic is perhaps the most interesting, Davis says. In general, she finds a lot of confusion about social media policies. People feel that the policy applies only to what they do at work and not what happens at home or away from the office. And, apparently, about half of employees, as indicated above, just don’t care what the policy says.
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What Are the Challenges and Concerns?
Davis suggests that the biggest concern is negative publicity that could harm the company’s reputation, result in loss of sales, discourage top candidates from applying to the company, and reduce morale within the ranks.
A secondary concern is the legal ramifications associated with potentially violating employees’ privacy either with online searches or internal corporate restrictions.
In tomorrow’s Advisor, we’ll take a look at proactive steps you can take to set social media boundaries and guidelines, and we’ll hear about an upcoming webinar that will show you how you can use social media to attract top talent.
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